Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980)

Spoilers!

I’ve never really got Brian De Palma. Of all the movie brats (Spielberg, Coppola, etc) he’s the one I’ve engaged with least, and he’s probably the least respectable in critical circles. Post The Untouchables (1987) he became more mainstream, hitting blockbuster heights with Mission: Impossible (1996) but has tailed off since, with his most recent films gaining less attention and smaller releases. Maybe mainstream success was the end of him because Dressed to Kill is far more interesting than his blockbusters, reveling in sleaze and controversy, but also showing how good De Palma can be.

When released in 1980 Dressed to Kill was widely condemned by feminists and gay rights groups for its depiction of violence and transsexualism. All the women are subjected to serious violence and terror. Sexual difference was linked to violence. However 24 years distance and the film takes on a very different light, one in which men are repeatedly exposed and condemned. If anything this film shows us how women’s desire is continuously repressed and negated by society.

The opening of the film would be unheard of today, a long lingering set of shots on Angie Dickinson (49 at the time) in the shower fantasizing. It’s a moment that simultaneously acknowledges female desire, and suggests that women over 40 can be attractive and have a sex drive. In the cinema culture of today, where actresses are getting younger and disposed of by age 40, this seems unfathomable. It is alas all a dream for Angie, and the film cuts abruptly to the “wham, bam, thank-you ma’am” sexual practice of her husband. Angie fakes it, but her discontent is obvious to us. She visits her shrink, Michael Caine, and confesses her need to be desired. What follows is a wonderful, dreamlike, sequence in an art gallery where Angie pursues a man, and is pursued by him. The camera drifts along the corridor tracking her excitement and fear, as she follows him, and is followed. An amazing scene happens, again one that I can’t imagine would occur in today’s Hollywood, in which the man goes down on Angie in the back of a cab. The whole sequence, from gallery to cab, focuses on her pleasure and desire, and shows sex as something other than a penetrative act.

She awakes, happy. It can’t last of course. She discovers the man has VD and as she flies a woman brutally murders her in an elevator, with a cut-throat razor no-less. Here the film switches to Nancy Allen, a “Park-Avenue Whore”, who witnesses the murder (and whose John scarpers at the first sight of blood). As Nancy becomes a target, Michael Caine starts getting threatening answer-phone messages from a trans-gender patient and the plot deepens.

I can see where the critics came from in 1980, decrying the fact that the sex in the film is linked to violence and violation, and that in a world where the trans-community was struggling with it’s representation the inclusion of a possible trans-killer was not helpful. But today the film reads more as a critique of men, with both women used and attacked repeatedly. In a patriarchal world what other punishment for daring to embrace one’s sexual desire could there be for a women other than disease and death? The heroine, Nancy Allen, is blackmailed by the sleazy cop (a young Denis Franz) into doing her own detective work. While pursued by the killer she’s repeatedly hustled, and leered at by men, a status as object only re-enforced by her job (although the film shows how she uses information from customers to gain investment info). The only male figure in the film to emerge sympathetically is Angie’s son, a tech-obsessed geek depicted in a pre-adolescent phase. The film seems to say that the only man worth anything is the one who hasn’t yet woken up to sex. What is a male-to-female trans-sexual but the ultimate male possession of woman, body and soul?

Stylistically the film contains some wonderful shots and techniques, really building on De Palma’s reputation as a Hitchcock style film-maker. The use of mirrors is especially well done, and a sequence on a train platform, and then in the train, masterfully ratchets up the tension. Some of the acting is a bit rough around the edges but overall it’s top entertainment and an example of the type of film Hollywood rarely makes these days; a modestly budgeted thriller aimed at adults.